Would You Consider This Bad Usability?

I propose the title of this blog post as more of a question to my readers (yes it is web related so don't let the backstory fool you). Here's the story. A few weeks back my wife and I decided that we were both going to enter some baked goods into the local county fair in a friendly little competition. You see, I have bested my mother-in-law (a very decorated and proficient baker) in acquiring ribbons a few times over the past few years. So my wife decided to throw her hat in the ring this year.

So she went to the website of the county fair and submitted her entries online. A few days later I hit the same website with the same intentions and was completely stumped. It seemed pretty obvious - click on the 'Online Registration' link right from the home page - how could I screw that up? Unfortunately I kept getting a PDF version of the available categories opposed to an online entry form. I searched and searched the home page - thinking I may be missing something. Frustrated I called my wife into the room to ask her what I was doing wrong. Amazingly she pointed out that the individual category entries in the PDF were in fact hyperlinks to the entry form for that category.

So my issue here is this. While I think the overall idea here is somewhat cool - I feel this is really bad from a usability standpoint. I mean come on - I do this stuff (web development) for a living and I was stumped as to how to get to the actual entry form. At the same time my wife - who admittedly is less web savvy - found out how to enter quite easily. The biggest issue I have is that after figuring this out I went back and searched diligently for any sort of instructions that would have told me how the system worked - and found nothing. There was no text highlighting/coloring/underlining whatsoever in the PDF that indicated that the items were actual links.

Thoughts? Is it just me, or have others seen this before?

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